Dyspeptic retired Marine wife/tech wench attempts to enlighten the great unwashed of the blogosphere while dodging snarky commentary from the local knavery.

April 17, 2012

Tuesday Odds and Ends

... unless and until our legislature decides to tackle this issue, our courts must consider the individual circumstances of each case. In this case, because Husband and Wife never made an agreement prior to undergoing IVF, and these pre-embryos are likely Wife’s only opportunity to achieve biological parenthood and her best chance to achieve parenthood at all, we agree with the trial court that the balancing of the interests tips in Wife’s favor.

The appellate court also stressed that the ex-wife had promised not to seek child support from the ex-husband, and to otherwise structure the divorce settlement in a way that minimizes the risk that the ex-husband will be held liable for child support.

....researchers found a striking correlation: the group of college students least likely to report engaging in risky behavior (drinking, binge drinking, marijuana use and smoking) were those who contributed the most, financially, to their own education. Those students were also more likely to identify strongly with their future occupational identity — the ultimate goal of their degree. To Laura Padilla-Walker, who led the study, and her colleagues this suggests that the level of parental financial support provided to college students may be an important factor in determining whether they flourish or flounder at their academic pursuits.

Next they'll be telling us that hard work builds character, or that there's a relationship between having to work for what you have and appreciating it.

Jerry Brown, California’s reborn Governor Moonbeam, defines his “millionaire’s tax” as applying to anybody who earns more than $250,000 a year. “Anybody who makes $250,000 becomes a millionaire very quickly,” he explained. “You just need four years.” This may be the simplest wealth-creation advice since Bob Hope was asked to respond back in 1967 to reports that he was worth half a billion dollars. “Anyone can do it,” said Hope. “All you have to do is save a million dollars a year for 500 years.”

It’s that easy, folks! Like President Obama says, all you have to do to pay off his 2011 deficit is save $3.2 billion a year for 500 years.

Who cares whether the policy actually works? It's how we feel about it that matters.

Apparently the soaring national debt and the threat of a nuclear Iran are not enough to occupy the government's time, because the Obama administration is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the government's preconceptions.

Behind all this busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption is that the absence of evenness or randomness -- whether in employment, housing or innumerable other situations -- shows a "problem" that has to be "corrected."

No speck of evidence is considered necessary for this assumption to prevail at any level of government, including the Supreme Court of the United States. No one has to show the existence, much less the prevalence, of an even or random distribution of different segments of the population -- in any country, anywhere in the world, or at any period of history.

Comments

There are a couple of things about this, too, one of which strikes my cynical mind as typical of Progressives' views: The appellate court also stressed that the ex-wife had promised not to seek child support...structure the divorce settlement...minimizes the risk that the ex-husband will be held liable for child support.

coupled with [substitution in Volokh's cite]

The primary focus for Husband [on appeal] is that the trial court erred in finding that Wife’s interests in procreating outweighed Husband’s interests to avoid unwanted procreation.

Hmm.... So the elimination of fiscal responsibility also eliminates any moral relationship with the...zygotes...or any resulting children? I cannot tell whether the morality inherent in the husband's interests were asserted by him in his appeal, but that morality assuredly does underlie the treatment of these zygotes.

Wife’s...best chance to achieve parenthood at all....

I'd be interested in the court's logic in ruling out adoption as a means of "achieving parenthood at all."

Obama administration is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the government's preconceptions.

They'll build the field and no one will come. What then? Forced relocation of the disadvantaged into these fields, for their own good?

That's not entirely fanciful, as this, courtesy of the FSA from an earlier time shows, although then it was forced relocation out of the fields. Oh, wait--that was another Progressive activity.

Heh. I had fun in my first year of grad school, on a degree I never finished, ethics class. I was cwazy. Actually citing the arguments of the Holy See in a science course, and talking about this as if it were people merely treating children as a commodity we must have to complete our lives like a Monet painting or a pair of Manolo shoes? "You're an idiot, gollum." Except, here we are.

Now there's DNA screening to get into elite private schools.

Yeah, and they say 'Der Mench ist/sind(?) ein Machine' is a dead concept. Now they just call it 'you are your genes', the body/mind duality is false, and free will is a myth.